In 1963 I was working at a summer job on campus. It was on the PDP-1 computer, made by Digital (DEC).
And yes, it had an interactive debugger, called DDT. You could set a breakpoint, examine and alter variables, patch code. The text editor was quite primitive, and we often used an offline paper tape machine instead.
The language was assembler. The machine had something like 4k of 18 bit words. No operating system.
By 1971, I was on a PDP-10 with 262,144 words of 36 bits each. An interactive timesharing system that supported maybe 10 concurrent users, a text editor called TECO, a debugger still called DDT, and languages like Lisp, Fortran, Basic, and Algol. TECO was really powerful. You could write text manipulating programs in it.
The PDP-10 was the basis for a similar machine made at Palo Alto Research, where the office of the future was born. Ethernet, the mouse and the GUI, e-mail, the laser printer, and object oriented programming. Palo Alto had all that. Ten years before the PC.
A lot of this stuff has been forgotten, and then reinvented several times in the years since then. And of course, there is a whole lot of new stuff as well.
Moving forward to 1991, I was working on a VAX. My primary language was SQL, although I wrote stuff in PASCAL when necessary. I also used DCL and Datatrieve as scripting languages, although we didn't use that term.
The VAX did not have an IDE at that time, at least not where I worked. But the text editor, the compilers, the linker, the debugger, and the command language were all built with the idea that the developer was going to use all of them. They worked together well. Remembering a handful of commands was no more difficult than remembering where a given tool is on a toolbar. Retyping the commands was made easier by command recall.
The VAX had an excellent debugger, but I never learned it. PASCAL made it pretty easy to get programs right to begin with, and structured programming made it pretty easy to localize a bug without using a debugger. Debugging SQL is a whole different ballgame.
In addition to working on the VAX, I used desktop tools to manipulate data locally. These were either MS Office tools or their precursors, I don't remember. The hard part was linking desktop tools to data stored in a database on the VAX.